Kinds of sequels, and BioShock 2 🫧

🎵The song for this post is Potential for Anything, by Magnus Pålsson for the game VVVVVV🎵

What do you do after a surprise, huge hit? How do you follow it up?

I think sequels are juicy. I recently played BioShock and BioShock 2, and a decade ago I played BioShock: Infinite. I'll present a little framework I have for sequels and follow-ups, then use that this framework to talk about BioShock's sequels.

(also, a lot of people are asking me what I'm doing after Ramp, so this is something I'm thinking about more generally. but it's safer, and easier, to talk about art 😛)

Typically, I see sequels to big hits take one of three paths.

Path the first: Stay in your lane, play the hits (the standard sequel)

give them what they want, which is more of the first thing. but not too different

This is what most people think of when they think of sequels: take the flavor notes of the first thing, and give them more. Michael Bay's Transformer movies, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies (the Tobey Maguire ones). There's nothing wrong with this, but this path eventually loses steam because, well... you already hit the notes, and people will listen to the same song only so many times.

There's not a whole lot to say about these. It's the most popular path when something was a hit. A few other factors can make it even more likely to get picked:

• If the original was more "entertaining" than "smart," and more "well-executed" than "unprecedented, genre-breaking," this is a better fit than the other two.

• If the original was built by a team, or the showrunner wasn't taking Auteur 🧐 credit, the life of the property gets managed by committee, who will make safer choices. This also changes the stakes: it's not someone's artistic brand that's getting evaluated with each new sequel.

Path the second: believe the hype, you're a genius, don't let them down!

or, get trapped in your own head, and flounder. don't worry, many will still call you some kind of genius

I also call this "aim for the grand slam." This is when the artist or Auteur sees everyone rumbling over their amazing genius after Part 1, so they think really hard, for a very long time about what to do next. "The next thing's gotta be big!!" in all the ways the last one was. But rather than aim for bigger spectacle while hitting the exact same notes (path 1), they aim for... I'd call it "perceived depth"? They don't hit the flavor notes of the last piece, but for the "genius" ones in its reaction; what they got praised most prestigiously for. The piece that results is more tightly crafted, but ultimately weaker as an experience because it actually took fewer risks. The piece commits to nothing as strongly as its own authorship and professed genius. Part 1 was a spicy curry, but Part 2 is lightly flavored stock in a fancy bowl, and everyone goes "it's so subtle!!", forgetting the food is supposed to taste like something.

Examples:

Jonathan Blow: Braid to The Witness. Braid was a perfectly-executed, tightly-packed, very provocative puzzle game that really blew the lid off indie games. It inspired people to re-think how they could feel playing games, the quality of games made by small teams, and its players spent years discoursing what it was ultimately about.

The Witness, on the other hand, is a perfectly competent puzzler, but lacks commitment to any thing (other than "I am Jonathan Blow and I think a lot"). Vaguely libertarian tape recordings are just dropped everywhere? Some of them 40 minutes? They allude to Deep Thought but don't commit to expressing or opining on anything. Braid didn't ever have a character look at the camera and say something like "This is about nuclear weapons!!", but it did have little bits of concrete imagery, e.g. the little Goomba guys, "hero" and princess and villain. The Witness removes all concrete imagery for a pastel-covered world devoid of any real life. To paraphrase a line of Rick Sanchez's, the game is a monument to thematic compromise.

Jordan Peele: Get Out to Us. I saw the original Get Out at a midnight showing the weekend it opened, before it got mainstream. I raved about it to all my friends: it was targeted, hilarious, imaginative. It perfectly mixed terror and anxiety with gut-punching comedic moments, threaded with tons of little secrets. It surprised people with how well the pulpy plot fit into the US's relationship to its own racial history. That said, it never forgot that it was playing a tune that meant to get your blood pumping, or that it was also supposed to be entertaining for people who didn't want the deep shit.

Us took the "Dirty Dancing sweaty party for the workers" vibe of Get Out, dressed it in a tux, and presented it to critics at the Met. Every frame carried portent. People who fawned over Peele looked for (and found, or made up) Meaning in every little moment. For a lot of critics it became a game to come up with the most adjulatory fawning of its historical justice allegory. A lot of them didn't realize that by turning him from "an amazing filmmaker" to "one of our generation's Most Important Voices 🧐," they were becoming "I'd vote for Obama a third time if I could" guy.

PSY: Gangnam Style to Gentleman. I'm a little torn on this one, and it might really belong to the first category. He tries to hit many of the same notes (even getting a ton of cheap callbacks with characters from the first video: the banana suit guy, the pelvis guy). But I feel like it still applies: Gangnam Style was PSY being PSY for his normal audience of Koreans, now he had to produce something for the world and I think he got too in his head here. It goes through the motions, but tries to be The Big Splash, and it ends up not committing as hard to anything.

(also, no knock PSY. his work after Gentleman, when he had less spotlight on him, had winners. I love DADDY (though I prefer the dance rehearsal video to the actual video), and Napal Baji is another banger. When (when!) I teach dance fitness again, I'm choreographing these)

To be clear, none of these follow-ups are bad. But if you experienced them fresh, without priming your mind with "this is the work of the genius who made [X]!," would you really be as moved? Would you have enjoyed them as much? Would they have commanded anywhere near the same amount of cultural space if they were debuts?

Path the third: trust your gut to grow as an artist, and do something a little different. Expand the world, don't merely grow it

or: lose a lot of your fans, and condemn yourself to spending the rest of your life hearing people say you dropped the ball when you actually just did something creative.

This is, if you couldn't tell, my favorite one. Here the artist knowingly makes major changes to grow the work (usually by altering the surrounding world of it), risking alienation of many enthusiastic fans who got too attached to the flavor notes of the first, but missed the heart. But another audience, one who can see what they're doing or is a bit more open-minded, can appreciate that they really took a shot, rather than playing the hits.

Examples:

Avatar: The Last Airbender into The Legend of Korra. Everyone told me Korra was an optional watch, and "doesn't hold up" to ATLA, but I ended up liking it more? No disprespect to ATLA, it's one of the best shows ever aired, but I think the only thing harder than creating world-changing original work is to follow it up, and I think they really did a lot of great things here?

• Korra and her gang's age group (mid-late adolescence) is a hard one to make sympathetic and interesting vs. ATLA's pre-teens. It's a whole new class of conflicts, and lets kids who watched ATLA grow with their protagonists.

• The age of machines! They really expanded the world beautifully, adding "ATLA future" with themes and the fun imagery of industrialization, and also "ATLA past" with the backstory of the spirit world.

• Consequences! At every season finale, Korra loses something, often big, way more than most shows for audiences of almost any age. Yes, there's plot armor: you were confident none of the leads would die. But they certainly lost! When she's losing her ability to talk to previous Avatars, or ends a season handicapped, you see very strongly (better than Aang's storyline could show?) the downsides of being cast in the hero's role.

• Villains. While Unalaq is a bit of a whiff, Kuvira, Zaheer, the Red Lotus terrorist group... all were amazing villains, way ahead of Fire Lord Ozai IMO.

Korra didn't have to do any of this? They could have just made a few more seasons of "Aang and friends," which, per the first sequel template, wouldn't hit as hard. In my opinion, the Korra play worked, but even in cases when similar plays don't (George Lucas's Star Wars prequels) I can still find plenty to love, and I'm glad they swung for the fences.

Breaking Bad into Better Call Saul. While Saul is now pretty well-regarded as a great show in its own right, I can't tell you the number of men (always men) who, during its first three seasons, "gave it a try, but it doesn't hold a candle to Breaking Bad." And again, if what you liked was Walt being a badass, the performance of gritty crime, and Jesse yelling "Bitch!", Saul doesn't play those notes. What you get is a powerful drama of sibling love and rivalry, legacy and how we build it, prestige and how we signal it, American justice, how to make amends in the shadow of your previous actions. And Kim Fucking Wexler!!

Parappa the Rapper into UmJammer Lammy. I'll keep this one short because few people in my life played the original, and literally nobody played the sequel (UmJammer). Like Korra, it's considered the "ugly stepchild" of Parappa, and when they released the next game in the series, they pretended UmJammer never existed (Parappa the Rapper 2 for the PS2). It's a tragedy though; the melodies are way more complex and diverse, the story let itself get weird, and there are even Parappa levels for babies who wanted the original experience.

So, BioShock

When I played BioShock, I also played 2009's BioShock 2. I had a fine time, but I had to reconcile a few things:

• It felt a bit like Type 1 (play the hits, safe sequel) when I played it, but after finishing, it felt a little more Type 3?

• Critical reaction to this was fine at the time, but BioShock fans mostly treat it as the "weird stepchild" of the franchise; with many people telling their friends to skip it, and the Zero Punctuation review for Infinite wanting to forget it ever existed.

So what gives?

Here's a really juicy tidbit: Ken Levine, the fancy Auteur of BioShock 1, didn't work on this. It was made by a sibling studio, mostly of people who split out, and the tea is that they didn't want to work for him again (it wouldn't surprise me if the named auteur was a micromanaging, overly-controlling boss).

I didn't know that while playing, so a few times I found myself thinking "oh, he just can't help himself." I was noting that by making Lamb's cult a bunch of collectivists, he gets to be seen critiquing ideology ("a smart game has something to say about The Big Ideas"), while creating a dumb moral equivalence between her faction and the hyper-individualists of BS1. This is a Levine move: In Infinite he tried to make the Vox Populi just as evil as the racist Founders who oppressed them. "See: racists crushing rights of brown people are bad, but so are the brown people who are forced to use violence to obtain their rights!"

Once I got to the end of BS2, I realized a number of things were missing from the normal Levine formula:

• There was no big, contrived twist. You can see places where they'd set it up: For Sinclair, there were a lot of clumsy hints that your collaborator was a shifty profiteer who'd end up betraying you, or having some other special identity. There were the recordings of that one dad (Mark Meltzer) looking for his daughter and discovering Rapture, which could have led to the reveal that he was you. Eleanor was this perfect MacGuffin/damsel, the structure for which just aching to have her surprise you as some kind of manipulator. And yet: nothing! You were who everyone said you were, so were the other characters.

• I don't love that it re-used the "spare or harvest Little Sisters?," especially since the first game's ending was ostensibly about freeing them. But, the other lever of the endings (whether you spare or kill the three NPCs)... was done very well? I spoiled the ending mechanics for myself since I only wanted to do a single playthrough, and thought "spare all = good ending," but the actual morality play was much more interesting and nuanced than anything in a Levine-led game. It wasn't "good ending!" vs. "evil ending!," it was merely "you teach your daughter mercy" vs. "you teach your daughter justice," an actually interesting moral dilemma, and does a lot to further the themes and characterization of your protagonist!

When you play Infinite, with Levine back at the wheel: he's done away with all player-directed endings (it just has one), the themes that are force-fed to you are teenage-boy simplistic, and there's an extremely convoluted and messy multiverse plot with A Big Twist. So it's no wonder a large subset of fans say BioShock 2 was lame and Infinite is the "real" sequel. But on the whole, I liked BS2 more as a sequel. If games were uppers, BioShock was exhilirating cocaine, BioShock: Infinite was meth you were told was cocaine (and a number of people can't tell the difference, or a just chasing a rush however it's delivered), and BioShock 2 is a dirty macha latte, a lot of warm blankets, and headset playing ASMR. It's an upper too, but a different one, and frankly, smoother.

A few final observations that don't have a place:

• The game itself of BioShock 2 was way better than the first. It still had a few of the clumsy control issues of assigning weapons and plasmids, but the hacking minigame was way better (and the remote hacking dart!), the level design (for gameplay, not "set piece") was superb. The Big Sisters were a fantastic new boss.

• I understand what the creative team was trying to do with Lamb and The Family, but it really didn't hit. And for good reason, Rapture is one of the best set pieces ever built, but it was built to critique a different ideology. Trying to critique collectivists using Rapture felt like using a melon baller as a soup spoon. Lamb's entire motivation for detaining Eleanor and pumping her full of ADAM is more reminiscent of the "precious bodily fluids" guy from Dr. Strangelove than any coherent motivation. It's just "she lost her damn marbles."

  And like BioShock, the setting's weird magic makes motivations muddy in a way I don't love. You and Eleanor have a father/daughter relationship, but it's also because your body will literally mechanically fail and die unless you are in proximity with her, taking care of her, because of the rules of the world. You're programmed to have this motivation? I suppose this is an interesting twist on BS1's "Would You Kindly," kind of in reverse ("you never had a choice!", but different this time) but eh, I like motivations that are useful instead of forced.

• Together, while I enjoyed the act of playing BioShock 2 more, and even liked the composition of it, it's still just not as enjoyable as your first time through Rapture, when everything is new, and the set piece is exactly fitting the story its telling. Them's the breaks 🤷